Sure, your old phone might become a brick, software might rot from lack of updating, and once beloved platforms may go unsupported turning into “legacies,” but they’re never truly gone. They’ve sunset, receded into the horizon as a sliver of their brilliance continues glowing and the world keeps turning.

“Sunsetting” is an unexpectedly lovely term for retiring a piece of technology. Rather than announce that something is over and done, a bad idea whose time is up, tech companies and their pals in the tech press suggest an obsolete device or service is merely fading away. Like that farm where your beloved childhood dog went when she got old, the sunset welcomes those artifacts of futures past in its warm embrace.

And like your old dog, you’ll never see them again.

In early January, Facebook decided that its users didn’t need a personal concierge — or in the words of Buzzfeed’s Alex Kantrowitz, the social media giant “is sunsetting the initial version of M, which has been available in closed beta since fall 2015.”

In 2017, AOL discontinued its Instant Messenger, a representative of the former tech juggernaut telling Motherboard’s Jason Koebler they were “sunsetting” the once ubiquitous chat platform.

In 2016, Sunrise, Microsoft’s calendar app, was sunset to the dismay of users but to the delight of sites like TechCrunch and Recode, which couldn’t resist a good sunrise/sunset headline.

So, why all this sunsetting? Why can’t tech companies just make a clean break, pull the plug on products that are faulty, unloved or misguided and just move on? Because perception is everything, and even in the Silicon Valley culture of “fast failure” and “move fast and break things,” admitting you were wrong could mean the difference between being the next Facebook or being the next Friendster.

Aside from market share, there’s ego on the line. As we’ve seen with so many companies twisting themselves in knots to explain away errors, oversights and outrages, no one wants to admit they’re wrong. It’s so much easier to write off your failure in the soothing imagery of nature, suggesting as you do that the world moves on, and the sun sets on us all — the good, the bad and the just poorly executed — someday.

It’s sort of reassuring, if you think about it. The things you loved, from your first Walkman to your last BlackBerry to that once-promising dating app you signed up for between boyfriends, aren’t gone, they’re just … somewhere in the distance. Forgotten, but not gone.

So dawn goes down to day/ Nothing gold can stay.

And with that, we sunset Newspeak, a column tracking Silicon Valley’s buzzwords as they make their way into everyday speech. These words will continue to disrupt language as they trend across platforms, but someone else will have to share their learnings with the crowd as we walk off into the sunset.